Double Dragon retrospective: A singular creation | NES Works #081

Quite simply the best gaming retrospectives on all of YouTube

Me: "Double Dragon. That was a fun rental." Mr. Parish: "I'm going to teach y'all how history was irrevocably changed by this one title"

I still remember going to Walmart and getting my grandmother to buy Double Dragon NES for me. My best friend and I played the hell out of it.

One of my favourite NES games. The lack of 2-Player mode was sad, but understandable seeing as it was Technos first NES game and they were avoiding any sprite flicker. The combat was very similar to the arcade, and the extra levels really gave value for money. Just to say, Renegade did get two official sequels, but they were for the 8-Bit Microcomputers only. Target Renegade was even better than the first game, but Renegade 3 was lacking.

One thing I always found interesting was getting a Double Dragon home port in 1988 it being fun, but there was the let down of it being 1 player. Then a couple years later you have the brawler that basically ate Double Dragon's lunch, Final Fight, get a home console port on Nintendo's new, awesome 16 bit system....and it's ALSO only one player.

Before I watch this video, I want to thank you, Jeremy Parish for the excellent quality of the videos you make. I am always entertained when I select one of your videos.

I was super into Double Dragon as a kid. I first played the arcade game, and it blew me away at the time. And then when the NES version released, it was my choice for a birthday present. I even dressed as Billy Lee for Halloween with an outfit that my mom made me based on the artwork in the first issue of Nintendo Power. Good times.

One of my favorite childhood gaming memories was accidentally discovering that you can you bypass the second level boss by climbing down the ladders after he appears. It was simply me running away because I was scared to fight him, but my 6 year old mind was blown when I heard the victory jingle.

A friend and I started all our attempts at the summit of this game with grinding. Then we realized enemies would duck the spin kick finisher in the late chapters of the game. Our winning attempts managed the exp gain to balance getting the good combat tech when needed and pushing that wretched kick as far back as possible.

This was one of those elite group of games that I rented as a child (er, begged my grandmother to rent, rather) so many times that it would have been cheaper in the long run to buy. What a great game.

I always felt that the image art of Billy holding the whip, as seen on the video thumbnail looked like he was holding a pair of electric barber clippers in a threatening manner.

Great background mentioning The Warriors as well as Streets of Fire!

One! Singular creation, every Technos move we make.

the editing and aesthetics of your videos are amazing

9:01 Credit due - it feels like the first 'fighting game' which really does give room to SF and the rest in the next 10 -15 years.

Loving the level of deep detail provided as always. For anyone who wasn't there, it's impossible to understand just how inaccessible everyday foreign cultures - especially those like Japan which were entirely without lexical cognates - were at the time. We got a warped orientalist fantasy interpretation of samurai culture, degrading salaryman stereotypes, visual art, a bowdlerized version of Zen, sushi and some giant robots. But the visual semiotics of every day life - caricature style, religious & folk myth iconography, 99% of food culture etc. may as well have come from an alien planet, their embedded cultural genealogies being so removed from Euro-American culture streams as they were.   People living in Vancouver, Hawaii or San Fransisco may have had access to Japanese diaspora-owned shops with video rentals & out of date magazines. But for everyone else, it required a lot of digging through libraries, if the information was there at all. Seeing all this stuff in video games growing up and wondering what on Earth it all was definitely had an impact on my going into academia.

The 2 player fight mode was supposed to be how the main game was supposed to look like, but they couldn't figure out how to do the entire game in that style so it was scaled down

MMC1 could only switch graphics in 4KB size chunks. This meant that if the set of enemies changed, then the player's graphics had to be duplicated into that graphics bank, and this was a wasteful use of space. A few MMC1 games did things slightly differently, and put the enemy graphics inside of the background tileset, such as Clash at Demonhead. So when the environment type changes, the enemies change along with it. Then finally, MMC3 threw all those problems out the window, and let the player and enemy graphics be switched independently of each other.

I probably said this a bazillion times on other videos already, but if you haven't gotten hold of Double Dragon & Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle, you're seriously missing out.

Double Dragon in the arcade was one of my friend Jon and my favorite games, and we got to the point we could play through the full game with 2 credits each. When the NES version was released we were a little disappointed by the liberties taken with the game's arcade format, but caught up in the artificial game shortage made us determined to get our hands on a copy.